----- Original Message
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Sent: Saturday, April
06, 2002 4:26 AM
Subject: [tied] Re:
Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist Conflation
> I asked an Indologist friend who
is doing some thinking about this (although he is far from convinced) and he
thinks the only likely scenario is that if PIE was in India, it was not Sanskrit
but a dialect that had many non-IA features like centum forms, etc. This dialect
migrated to Central Asia (BMAC) and became what is generally considered PIE as
proposed by Nichols and Lal. Some remnants of this or its related dialects
*might* be seen in centum languages like Bangani and Tocharian.
A minor correction: you mean the putative
substrate in Bangani, not Bangani itself (which is an otherwise inconspicuous
Modern Indo-Aryan language).
> A different IIR dialect would have
emigrated in order to form Iranian. Sanskrit continued its separate evolution.
Thus you require only one migration (plus the smaller Iranian one.)
That's already two (even if you intend to
play down the significance of Iranian in the scenario ;)). However, you can't
derive all the non-Indo-Iranian languages from a single "sister" of Indo-Iranian
in the IE family tree. The primary divide (and the earliest split) within IE is
quite clearly between Anatolian and "the Rest". Apart from the topology of the
family tree, there are additional problems if you assume an early separation of
Indo-Iranian. Typological and lexical isoglosses demonstrate that
Proto-Indo-Iranian must have formed an areal grouping with the laguages
ancestral to Greek, Armenian, Phrygian, and probably Albanian as well, to the
exclusion of the other branches (with the possible exception of Thracian, about
which little can be said). It's easier to imagine such a grouping with
Indo-Iranian located in the Pontic steppes and then expanding southwards (while
the rest of the group remains in the vicinity of the Black Sea) than a concerted
migration of a cluster of distinct dialects miraculously preserving their
geographical configuration. Such a group migration would have had to be
independent of the migrations of the Balto-Slavic speakers and of the "Western"
branches (the major ones being Italic, Celtic and Germanic) -- which
further undermines the "one migration" scenario. I really can't see how one
could plausibly derive the IE languages from a homeland in India without
proposing _at least_ five or six separate movements.
> This PIE would then have interacted
with Uralic/Finno-Ugric since it is defensible that the loans are only one-way
into those languages families. After it left India, you can take your pick about
where it might have settled to play the role of PIE.
It isn't so simple. The loans in
Finno-Ugric are from IE, but not from PIE or any dialect "playing the role" of
PIE; in particular, I know of no evidence of contacts between Proto-Finno-Ugric
and any centum branch (which is a serious problem for your scenario). The
loans (very likely all of them) are distinctly Indo-Iranian and many of them
can't be dated to the post-split period, since the most archaic of
them show features like unpalatalised velars before front *e (still
retained!), and satem stops still reflected as affricates.
> Regarding areal studies: It is
obvious that IA is unique and that many words for plants and animals are lost at
the Hindu Kush. But these could just as easily have been lost LEAVING India when
they resided in Central Asia and they no longer needed the words for South Asian
flora and fauna that they didn't see anymore; or at least given different
meanings. ... These non-IE words could actually be part of the original Indian
PIE. Something is said to be PIE if it is found in several IE languages. If
words were not part of the Indian PIE that left India, or if they were lost
during the sojourn in Central Asia, then they would not appear to be PIE because
no other language would show them.
But the uniquely Indian names of plants and
animals are non-IE in terms of morpheme structure and phonotactics -- mind you,
for _structural_ reasons, not merely because they can't be found in the other
branches. They cannot be analysed or etymologised as normally formed IE words,
while they can often be traced back to various South Asian sources. Therefore,
they can't be PIE items lost by the other branches; they are foreign words
borrowed by the single branch that reached India.
> There are several historical examples of later language
movements destroying earlier languages. The later Scythian/Iranian and then
Turkic advances are suggested as reasons why there is no direct evidence for PIE
in Central Asia. Also, Nichols points out that homogeneity is actually a sign of
a homeland and diversity is found on the edges.
Just for the record, I personally do not place PIE in Central
Asia. As for homogeneity or heterogeneity indicating the homeland, it would be
naive to formulate any hard and fast rules, but homogeneity tends to indicate
relatively recent expansion. A homeland area will often show traces of _very
old_ linguistic boundaries rather than just a larger number of dialects. In the
US, for example, the East Coast and the old South show much more regional
differentiation (and historically older dialect divisions) than the West.
> It is very clear that there were many Sanksritic and other IA dialects
in India that have been lost. Witzel has written several papers on this. Also it
seems that the modern IA languages aren't directly connected to recorded
Sanskrit -- there was another dialect that gave rise to them. So we already have
evidence that at some time in the past the Indian languages became homogenized
for some reason perhaps due to Brahminical influence during the freezing of the
language in the Vedic texts.
What we see is the normal level of dialectal variability in _Old
Indo-Aryan_. Vernacular varieties of Indo-Aryan have never become homogenised or
"frozen". Quite the opposite: they have differentiated into scores of Modern
Indo-Aryan languages and local dialects. My original point was that while non-IE
substrates are copiously attested in India, we don't see any traces of old IE
languages that didn't belong to the Indo-Aryan group (as represented by Vedic
and languages or dialects different from Vedic but closely related to it). The
source of the Bangani substrate is a possible exception, but since it's
peripheral and isolated, it's more likely intrusive than autochthonous.
> Tocharian and Bangani [see above -- P.G.] are some non-homogeneous
examples. More might surface if they were sought out. The predominance of the
AMT thinking has put blinders on much of this research.
The Tocharian languages were _not_ spoken in the Indian region; they were
separated from it by the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, the Kunlun Shan and the
Taklamakan Desert. There was no Indian influence in those parts before the
arrival of Buddhist missionaries about the beginning of the common era. You
demonise what you call "AMT thinking" by suggesting that it makes scholars adopt
a blinkered attitude. I find the Bangani substrate data fascinating and would
love to see more such stuff. After Tocharian and Anatolian, another
centum language in the East isn't likely to revolutionise out thinking about the
structure of IE, but it's exciting all the same.
>> There may be still older (Proto-Satem [?] or dialectal PIE) loans
in FU, sometimes also in Samoyedic, though these are not uncontested
>
I contest them! :-)
But where can I read more about it?
They have
been discussed on Cybalist. If you search the archive using the name Koivulehto
as a keyword, you'll find some info. The relevant research has mostly been done
by Finnish linguists and the articles have been published in Finnish,
occasionally also in German. I would myself love to read J. Koivulehto's
conference paper "Varhaiset indoeurooppalaiskontaktit: aika ja paikka
lainasanojen valossa" (The early IE contacts: time and place in the light of
loanwords. Lammi, 1997), which I know only from an
English-language summary. Among other things, Koivulehto analyses the
chronological stratification of Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian loans and
their distribution within Finno-Ugric. His more recent publication in the same
field is:
Koivulehto, Jorma. 2000. "Finno-Ugric reflexes of North-West
Indo-European and early stages of Indo-Iranian". In: _Proceedings of
the 11th Annual UCLA IE Conference_, pp. 21-43.
Piotr